We have architecture problem on our project. This project requires sharding, as soon as we need almost unlimited scalability for the part of services.
Сurrently we use Node.js + MongoDb (Mongoose) and MySQL (TypeORM). Data is separated by databases through the simple 'DB Locator'. So node process needs connections to a lot of DBs (up to 1000).
Requests example:
HTTP request from client with Shop ID;
Get DB IP address/credentials in 'DB Locator' service by Shop ID;
Create connection to specific database with shop data;
Perform db queries.
We tried to implement it in two ways:
Create connection for each request, close it on response.
Problems:
we can't use connection after response (it's the main problem, because sometimes we need some asynchronous actions);
it works slower;
Keep all connections opened.
Problems:
reach simultaneous connections limit or some another limits;
memory leaks.
Which way is better? How to avoid described problems? Maybe there is a better solution?
Solution #1 perfectly worked for us on php as it runs single process on request and easily drops connections on process end. As we know, Express is pure JS code running in v8 and is not process based.
It would be great to close non-used connections automatically but can't find options to do that.
The short answer: stop using of MongoDB with Mongoose 😏
Longer answer:
MongoDB is document-oriented DBMS. The main usage case is when you have some not pretty structured data that you have to store, but you don't need to use too much. There is lazy indexing, dynamic typing and many more things that not allow you to use it as RDBMS, but it is great as a storage of logs or any serialized data.
The worth part here is Mongoose. This is the library that makes you feel like your trashbox is wonderful world with relations, virtual fields and many things that should not to be in DODBMS. Also, there is a lot of legacy code from previous versions that also make some troubles with connections management.
You already use TypeORM that may works instead Mongoose. With some restrictions, for sure.
It works exactly same way as MySQL connection management.
Here is some more data: https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/blob/master/docs/mongodb.md#defining-entities-and-columns
In this case you may use you TypeORM Repository as transparent client that will init connections and close it or keep it alive on demand.
I have an app that is already working with the native Node Mongo driver (v3.0).
I'm now trying to slowly implement Mongoose in order to make the app easier to maintain. I would like to do this in a gradual way so I rewrote all the user related operations with Mongoose and the rest like it was before. I noticed that my app now creates two connections to my Mongo db. This is clearly because Mongoose knows nothing about my existing connection.
I would like to handle connecting and disconnecting to Mongo myself and give Mongoose a reference to the already existing connection but I can't find anything like this in the docs.
Is this even possible or will I need two different connections until my app is fully rewritten to use Mongoose exclusively?
EDIT: My app is being run as an AWS Lambda function which has to connect and disconnect to mongo on every request so having two concurrent connections per request is effectively halving my mongo db available connections. That’s why I’m concerned about having an extra connection.
Turns out the answer to this is to do it the other way around. Just connect to Mongoose and then grab the connection.
let mongoConnection = mongoose.connection.client
in my application I have a default database and other database I have to connect to in function of client's requests , since with mongoose in node as far as I understood: there is a pool of connections application wide, if I change database, it is changed for all the subsequent requests, I think it could cause some problems, what is the best way to switch Database with mongoose?
Mongoose 3.7.1 (unstable) supports switching databases.
Otherwise you'll need to create separate connection instances for each database.
I have a node.js app that polls every x seconds a mongodb database to show data variations.
I think there must be a better way to do it, using all the capabilities of node.js environment ... which is the most efficient way to trigger mongodb data variations and showing them using node?
You can use a tailable cursor
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/create-tailable-cursor/
I have a good old-style LAMP webapp. A week ago I needed to add a push notification mechanism to it.
Therefore, what I did was to add node.js+socket.io on the server and poll the MySQL database every 10 seconds using node.js to check whether there were new items: if so, I would have sent them to the client(s) with socket.io.
I was pretty happy with the result, even if that is not a proper realtime notification (as there is a lag of up to 10 secs).
Now, I am about to build a new webapp which will need push notifications, too. I am wondering whether to go with the same approach as the first one (that I believe is more stable and mature) or to go totally Node.js, without PHP and Apache. As for the database, I have already decided to go for MongoDB.
Finally, my question is: if I go for Node.js+Socket.io+MongoDB will I get a truly near-real-time webapp? I mean, as soon as a new record is inserted into MongoDB, will there be some sort of event triggered that I can catch via node.js, do some checking on it and, if relevant, send the notification to the client? Or will there be anyway some sort of polling on the db server-side and lag, as with my first LAMP webapp?
A related question: can you build a realtime webapp on MySQL without doing any polling as I did with my first app. Or do you need MongoDB (or Redis)?
I hope this question is not too silly - sorry, I am just starting with Node.js and co.
Thanks.
I understand your problem because I switched to node.js from php/apache/mysql too.
Generally node.js is stable, modules and your scripts are the main reasons for errors
Real-time has nothing to do with database, it's all about client and server, you can query as many data as you want in your requests and push it to the other client.
Choosing node.js is very wise but it's harder to implement.
When you insert a new record to your db, the event is the request itself, you will make a push event along with the database query something like:
// Please note this is not real code, just an example of the idea
app.get('/query', function(request, response){
// Query your database
db.query('SELECT * FROM users', function(rows){
// Push notification to dan
socket.emit('database_query_executed', 'to_dan', rows);
// End request
response.end('success');
})
})
Of course you can use MySQL! And any database you want, as I said real-time has nothing to do with databases because the database is in the middle of the process and it's totally optional.
If you want to use node.js for push notifications and php/apache for mysql then you will need to create 2 requests for each server something like:
// this is javascript
ajax('http://node.yoursite.com/push', node_options)
ajax('http://php.yoursite.com/mysql_query', php_options)
or if you want just one request, or you want to use a form, you can call your php and inside php you can create an http or net request to node.js from php, something like:
// this is php
new HttpRequest('http://node.youtsite.com/push', HttpRequest::METH_GET);
Using:
A regular MongoDB Collection as the Store,
A MongoDB Capped Collection with Tailable Cursors as the Queue,
A Node worker with Socket.IO watching the Queue as the Worker,
A Node server to serve the page with the Socket.IO client, and to receive POSTed data (or however else the data gets added) as the Server
It goes like:
The new data gets sent to the Server,
The Server puts the data in the Store,
The Server adds the data's ObjectID to the Queue,
The Queue will send the newly arrived ObjectID to the open Tailable Cursor on the Worker,
The Worker goes and gets the actual data in the ObjectID from the Store,
The Worker emits the data through the socket,
The client receives the data from the socket.
This is 'push' from the initial addition of the data all the way to receipt at the client - no polling, so as real-time as you can get given the processing time at each step.
Re: triggers in MongoDB - please see this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12405093/1651408
There are much more convenient triggers in MySQL, but to call Node.js from them would require a bit of work with MySQL UDFs (user-defined functions), for instance pushing data through a Unix socket. Please note that this is necessary only when other applications (besides your Node.js process) are updating the database, and be sure to choose InnoDB as storage in this case (row- vs. table-level locking).
Can see no big problem with your technology choice of sockets.io, even if client-side web sockets aren't supported, you'll fall back (gracefully, I hope) to polling.
Finally, your question is not silly at all, since push technology is definitely superior to the flood of polling requests - it scales better. EDIT: However, would not describe either technology as real-time.
Another EDIT: for a quite well-known and successful setup of this kind please read this: http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/
Have you discovered Chole? It works separately from your web sever and interfaces with it by using HTTP POSTs. That way you can code your web app any which way you want.
Actually Using Push Technology like Socket.IO helps you to use
the server's resource efficiently and also helps you to leverage old browsers to modern browsers making websocket or websocket-like connection.
10 sec polling is a HTTP request which is expensive especially when a lot of users present.
Unlike polling technology, push technology is relatively cheap. Users' client is opening a dedicated socket(ie. websocket) to listen to the server's push notification.
And usually your client-side JavaScript do some actions when the push notification is received.
Using your LAMP stack and Socket.IO with different port (other than 80) will be good enough to implement what you need.
But using Node.js + MongoDB + Socket.IO actually helps you to manage your server's resource much efficiently.
Because those three have non-blocking nature.
If you understand non-blocking concept correctly and implement your app appropriately,
your identical app, an app with same feature but with different language and different database, would be able to handle a lot more requests than general LAMP stack.
Above picture is a famous chart of comparing Non-blocking vs Thread way to handle concurrency
Apache(Thread) vs Nginx(Non-blocking)
MySQL is a great database. I believe you won't need join and transactions for realtime notification.
MongoDB does not have those two features unless you implement similar features by yourself.
Because of not having those two and some characteristics of its own, MongoDB can store and fetch data much faster than traditional SQL databases.
Switching from MySQL to MongoDB will decrease the time taking to insert and fetch data.
with JS you can open a socket to your server (not old browser), the server will have a ah-hoc program (on an ad-hoc port, so you need the permission to open door and run program on your server) that will send data (almost) realtime from and to the client, and without the HTTP's protocol overhead.old browser will just fall-back to polling mechanism.
I can't see other way to do this (probably there are already "coocked" framework that do this)